Getting Somewhere

   

     I have, as a possibly odd idiosyncrasy of my personality an innate reluctance to give voice to any plans  that are less than roughly 75% formed in my mind or that are unlikely to come to fruition.  I often avoid mentioning trips or events that I know my kids will be excited about until the arrangements are made and I know we can make it work.  I can't stand to have anyone reading something I'm writing over my shoulder, even if it's a silly comment on Facebook and the over-the-shoulder reader is my six year old daughter.  Given this bit of neuroses, it may seem strange that I have decided to write a blog about building something I have never built before with the ultimate goal using it to take my family to the far coast of the country and back.  I think it is strange, but it may not be.  I have talked to my wife and kids about this trip a lot.  We have a large USA map on or dining room wall which we reference during discussions of possible routes and people and places we may visit. One of  Zoe's most recent bedtime books was Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley", his account of driving cross country with his dog.  I've talked about the "plan" to many family and friends, and made a very public declaration of intent: "The Little Trailer Project".  All of this makes me somewhat uneasy, but I think I deviated so wildly from my usual M.O. simply because the thing felt too complicated a concept to see my way through to the end.  I think I may have allowed myself to talk about it as a way to make it seem more real, more achievable.  In some way it has amplified the consequences of failure.  Maybe all of this will help me to avoid getting bogged down in the details, and, in the  immortal words of Dory the fish, "Just keep swimming."  Pontification over.  Time to build.

     In my last post I discussed making parts, preparing the trailer for assembly, and dry fitting the basic camper.  The dry fit was done prior to the application of the wheel well seal seen in the picture above on the right  because positioning the sides requires standing them on the trailer deck next to the 2" insulated floor.  This is easy without the seal, but the tightness of the compressed seal makes the task much more difficult.  I only wanted to do it once.  While I would have Kat there to help me, it was this particular task, which needed to be performed twice within the open time of a fair amount of glue, that prompted me to call in reinforcements.

Longtime friend, amazing artist, and favorite weirdo, Joe.

   With my helpers in the shop and a few tubes of construction adhesive locked and loaded we were ready to go.  The next set of pictures will seem like a bit of a jump, but that is because quite a few things needed to happen at once during the side installation.  All hands were needed to get things in the right place as quickly as possible.  First we ran a bead of glue down the edges of the floor and on the deck of the trailer where the camper sides would sit.  The bottom of the wheel well seal was strapped tight with a strap clamp to prevent it from getting pushed down as we wedged the sides in.  Once both sides were in, they were held apart while the forward bulkhead was glued and clamped into position.  After a few final adjustments we screwed everything in place.

Sides up with forward bulkhead clamped in place

In one door and out the other

Inside of front bulkhead 

The screws are countersunk into the floor stringers roughly every 4", and will eventually be covered with a wood trim.

     The next pieces are the rear bulkhead and the galley countertop and cabinet back assembly.   The bulkhead will support the countertop and together with the galley cabinet back will insure the squareness of the camper sides.  A cleat is glued and screwed to the galley floor inside what will become the galley cabinet.  Next the sides are forced apart and the rear bulkhead, already outfitted with side cleats is glued and screwed in place.  The countertop is placed on top of the bulkhead and support cleats attached to the sides and secured with screws.  The top of the cabinet back is checked  for squareness to the countertop and clamped into position.

Here you can see the floor cleat to which the bulkhead will be attached and the countertop support cleats.

Kat holding the sides apart to make space for the bulkhead

Countertop and cabinet back assembly going in

      Last to go  in are the forward and aft sleeping cabin cabinets.  Surely you get the idea by now; glue and screws.  The cabinets are really no different.  The real challenge with the cabinets is getting them in to place without smearing glue all over the inside of the camper walls.

In this picture you can see the forward cabinet on it's back on the floor and the aft cabinet to the right.

Typically, glue does not make me this happy, but my wife was dorking it up behind the camera.

As you can see, the forward cabinet is really heavy.  Luckily, Joe is pretty beastly.

Drilling holes for wires to run behind the cabinet back

Front cabinet installed

Aft cabinet installed

     It was a fun day.  To this point I had been spending quite a lot of time putting things together and it didn't seem like I had all that much to show for it.  Now I have something that is beginning to like like an actual teardrop camper, and it's not coming apart.  It always seems to me that the toughest part of any building project is the beginning; the imagining something that doesn't yet exist, the speculative part.  Once I have a cabinet, or a piece of furniture, or a whatever begin to take shape in front of me, things get a little easier, the questions a bit more specific.  There's still a lot of head scratching to do, and tons of sawdust to make, but this feels like a bigger step than all those that came before it.